The goal of plant breeding is to combine in a single variety/hybrid various desirable traits of the parental lines. For field crops, these traits may include resistance to diseases and insects, tolerance to heat and drought, reducing the time to crop maturity, greater yield, and better agronomic quality. With mechanical harvesting of many crops, uniformity of plant characteristics such as germination and stand establishment, growth rate, maturity, and fruit size, is important.
Field crops are bred through techniques that take advantage of the plant's method of pollination. A plant is self-pollinating if pollen from one flower is transferred to the same or another flower of the same plant. A plant is cross-pollinated if the pollen comes from a flower on a different plant.
In Brassica, the plant is normally self sterile and can only be cross-pollinated. In self-pollinating species, such as soybeans and cotton, the male and female plants are anatomically juxtaposed. During natural pollination, the male reproductive organs of a given flower pollinate the female reproductive organs of the same flower.
Maize plants (Zea mays L.) present a unique situation in that they can be bred by both self-pollination and cross-pollination techniques. Maize has male flowers, located on the tassel, and female flowers, located on the ear, on the same plant. It can self or cross pollinate. Natural pollination occurs in maize when wind blows pollen from the tassels to the silks that protrude from the tops of the incipient ears.
A reliable method of controlling male fertility in plants would offer the opportunity for improved plant breeding. This is especially true for development of maize hybrids, which relies upon some sort of male sterility system.
The development of maize hybrids requires the development of homozygous inbred lines, the crossing of these lines, and the evaluation of the crosses. Pedigree breeding and recurrent selection are two of the breeding methods used to develop inbred lines from populations. Breeding programs combine desirable traits from two or more inbred lines or various broad-based sources into breeding pools from which new inbred lines are developed by selfing and selection of desired phenotypes. A hybrid maize variety is the cross of two such inbred lines, each of which may have one or more desirable characteristics lacked by the other or which complement the other. The new inbreds are crossed with other inbred lines and the hybrids from these crosses are evaluated to determine which have commercial potential. The hybrid progeny of the first generation is designated F.sub.1. In the development of hybrids only the F.sub.1 hybrid plants are sought. The F.sub.1 hybrid is more vigorous than its inbred parents. This hybrid vigor, or heterosis, can be manifested in many ways, including increased vegetative growth and increased yield.
Hybrid maize seed is typically produced by a male sterility system incorporating hand manual detasseling. To produce hybrid seed, the male tassel is removed from the growing female inbred parent, which has been planted in alternating rows with the other male inbred parent. Providing that there is sufficient isolation from sources of foreign maize pollen, the ears of the female inbred will be fertilized only with pollen from the male inbred. The resulting seed is therefore hybrid and will form hybrid plants. What is sought is an efficient, inexpensive, reliable method of rendering the female plant male sterile. Current methods have considerable disadvantages, as outlined below. This invention addresses those disadvantages.
Further, it can be appreciated that control of female fertility has advantages. Currently, once the female inbred is rendered male sterile, and the cross pollination has occurred, the male inbred plant is then physically removed since any inbred seed on the plant cannot be sold and should not be released. This adds to the expense through the removal process. However, if the male inbred could be rendered female infertile, it would not be necessary to remove the rows of males, and any chance of inbred seed becoming available is reduced. Approximately 20 percent of acerage in developing an inbred must be devoted to growing the male inbred. With female sterility in the male inbred, the male and female inbred can be grown together, with considerable cost savings. Unfortunately, the hand manual detasseling process is not entirely reliable. Occasionally a female plant will be blown over by a storm and escape detasseling. The natural variation in plant development can also result in plants tasseling after manual detasseling is completed. Or, a detasseler will not completely remove the tassel of the plant. In any event, the female plant will successfully shed pollen and some female plants will be self-pollinated. This will result in seed of the female inbred being harvested along with the hybrid seed which is normally produced.
Alternatively, the female inbred can be mechanically detasseled by machine. Mechanical detasseling is approximately as reliable as hand detasseling, but is faster and less costly. However, most detasseling machines produce more damage to the plants than hand detasseling. Thus, no form of detasseling is presently entirely satisfactory, and a need continues to exist for alternatives which further reduce production costs and the eliminate self-pollination in the production of hybrid seed.
The laborious detasseling process can be avoided by using cytoplasmic male-sterile (CMS) inbreds. Plants of a CMS inbred are male sterile as a result of factors resulting from the cytoplasmic, as opposed to the nuclear, genome. Thus, this characteristic is inherited exclusively through the female parent in maize plants, since only the female provides cytoplasm to the fertilized seed. CMS plants are fertilized with pollen from another inbred that is not male-sterile. Pollen from the second inbred may or may not contribute genes that make the hybrid plants male-fertile. Usually seed from detasseled normal maize and CMS produced seed of the same hybrid must be blended to insure that adequate pollen loads are available for fertilization when the hybrid plants are grown and to insure diversity.
There can be other drawbacks to CMS. One is an historically observed association of a specific variant of CMS with susceptibility to certain crop diseases. This problem has led to virtual abandonment of use of that CMS variant in producing hybrid maize.
Another form of sterility, genic male sterility, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,654,465 and 4,727,219 to Brar, et al. However, this form of genetic male sterility requires maintenance of multiple mutant genes at separate locations within the genome and requires a complex marker system to track the genes and make use of the system convenient. Patterson also described a genic system of chromosomal translocations which are effective, but complicated. U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,861,709 and 3,710,511.
Many other attempts have been made to improve on these drawbacks. For example, Fabijanski, et al., developed several methods of causing male sterility in plants (see EPO 89/3010153.8 publication no. 329,308 and PCT application PCT/CA90/00037 published as WO 90/08828). One method includes delivering into the plant a gene encoding a cytotoxic substance associated with a male tissue specific promoter. Another involves an antisense system in which a gene critical to fertility is identified and an antisense to the gene inserted in the plant. Mariani, et al. also shows several cytotoxin encoding gene sequences, along with male tissue specific promoters and mentions an antisense system. See EP 89/401,194. Still other systems use "repressor" genes which inhibit the expression of another gene critical to male sterility. PCT/GB90/00102, published as WO 90/08829.
As noted, an essential aspect of much of the work underway with male sterility systems is the identification of genes impacting male fertility.
Such a gene can be used in a variety of systems to control male fertility. Previously, a male sterility gene has been identified in Arabidopis thaliana and used to produce a male sterile plant. Aarts, et al., "Transposon Tagging of a Male Sterility Gene in Arabidopsis", Nature, 363:715-717 (Jun. 24, 1993). Such genes to date are mutants which cause the plant to be sterile.
The disadvantage of such prior systems is that the plant is normally fertile and sterility is initiated by a variety of approaches such as mutant gene, tissue specific cell killing, spraying a chemical that induces sterility or the like, and are complex, difficult to use, require some detasseling, are not reliable in causing all the desired plants to be male sterile, thereby allowing some inbred seed to be produced and at times use considerable amounts of chemicals or DNA sequences undesirable in a grain producing plant. They all cause sterility and fertility is restored by reversion to the native constitutively fertile state.
Here, the inventors have taken an entirely different approach. The invention allows the plant to be constitutively sterile, with fertility (not sterility) induced. This has several advantages.
First, inducement of sterility is inefficient. There are in excess of six to fourteen million pollen grains in one tassel. The inducement of sterility thus must be extremely foolproof to avoid unintentional self pollination. On the other hand, inducement of fertility need only be minimally effective since more than adequate pollen will be produced through partial restoration to achieve fertilization and increase in parent seed. Chemical treatment failure results in under production of pollen, and since pollen is normally overproduced by a wide margin, the process of this invention for production of parent seed will tolerate a treatment failure rate as high as 70% to 80% with minimal effects on yield of parent seed.
Second, there is no detasseling required, whereas with CMS, there is only a reduction of detasseling.
Third, by having the critical gene normally "off", chemical treatment is not necessary in the large-scale production of hybrid seed, so that chemical usage (and associated expense) is minimized and the risk of treatment failure is present only in the carefully controlled, limited scale production of parent seed, where self-pollination is desired.
Thus, one objective of the invention is a unique variation to the method of controlling sterility by using the DNA molecule to cause a plant to be sterile after transformation, with fertility, not sterility, induced.
An object of the invention is to provide a nucleic acid sequence, the expression of which is critical to male fertility in plants.
Another object of the invention is to provide a DNA molecule encoding an amino acid sequence, the expression of which is critical to male fertility in plants.
A further object of the invention is to provide a method of using such DNA molecules to mediate male fertility in plants.
A still further object is to provide a method of mediating fertility in plants by regulating expression of the DNA molecule naturally occurring in the plant.
Yet another object is to provide a method of mediating fertility in plants by delivering the DNA molecule into a plant such that expression of the DNA molecule may be controlled.
Another object is to provide plants wherein fertility of the plants is mediated by the DNA molecule.
A further object is to use plants having fertility mediated by the DNA molecules in a plant breeding system.
Further objects of the invention will become apparent in the description and claims that follow.